Iris’s younger sister notoriously loved the land. She dreamed of little else than stepping out of the ocean for good and living among the people and creatures above sea level.
“You know Shelly is too young.”
“She’s not that much younger than me. It can wait a year. Even two.”
“It cannot.”
“Why?”
“It will be too late by then. There is an election going on in the surface world this fall. Your betrothed has promised to create legislation that will make the ocean safe from land pollution. As such, this marriage must take place in ninety days. Before the upcoming election.”
“Ninety days? Mother, please, I beg you, choose someone else.”
“That is not an option. It must be someone who can represent all merfolk. As a princess, that is you. Tomorrow, you will go on land, and you will meet your groom. I won’t hear any more arguments about it.”
Iris had to try one last time. “You’re really sending me to live on land. With a stranger. For … for politics?”
Tatiana simply raised one elegant hand.
That was the end of it.
And maybe Iris had known, deep down, that her protests were pointless.
But that didn’t stop her heart from plummeting like a shipwreck.
She knew her mother could be unbending when her mind was made up. She would not be swayed by the emotions coursing through her middle daughter right then. And Iris would rather not cry in front of her mother.
She swam off, rushing through the halls, out the doors, past her beloved kelp gardens, and through the gates.
She didn’t stop.
Not at the spiraling reef towers where she and her sisters used to play tag. Not at the swirling sandbar where the dolphins came to dance. Not even when she swam past a current singer whose haunting melody faltered mid-note as Iris rushed past with tears clinging to her lashes.
She just kept going.
The pressure in her chest built with every stroke, like her ribs were tightening around her heart. Her tail flicked harder, faster, until the water around her blurred. She passed a jelly lantern, its tendrils pulsing with light.
She didn’t look back.
When she finally slowed, her breath caught on a sob.
She curled up by an old coral graveyard. The dead reef felt like her soul: bleached, picked over, and completely out of its element. Its wasted potential, the evidence of the harm the humans had inflicted upon her people, called to her as she folded forward, burying her face in her hands.
How could her mother ask this of her? To leave not only her home, but her homeland, the only thing she had ever known and loved, the people she had been committed to serving. Albeit a couple of minutes late. She wasn’t perfect. But shecared.
The fish found her soon enough, as they always did.
A sleepy trumpet fish twined gently around her wrist. A pair of pygmy seahorses nestled in the crook of her arm like living jewelry. Even a spiny lionfish hovered, not close enough to sting, but near enough to lend its quiet, comforting presence.
They brushed against her skin, teasing through her hairlike strips of seagrass, offering comfort she hadn’t asked for but desperately needed.
She hadn’t summoned them. But heartbreak, in her, always echoed through the currents. And so the fish came, determined to comfort her through it. It was a strange phenomenon that didn’t happen for either of her sisters. Iris always felt a little guilty, feeling like her emotions removed their free will. It felt like a cruel sort of irony that they would gain theirs just as she was losing her own.
There had to be a way out of this.
She could try speaking to her mother again. Maybe if she caught her in her private chambers, not on the throne, she might be able to appeal to her mother, not the queen.
It was a long shot, and Iris had little faith in her mother bending.
